The Portrait of the Artist as a young man: The Spielberg Story

The Portrait of the Artist as a young man: The Spielberg Story

Emon NC.

The Camera jerkily moved across the room until it found the source of the voice.

A man rose from his seat as a hurried zoom took him in a mid-long shot. He brought the microphone to his lips and hesitated…Amazement and excitement oozed from his being.

“It’s unbelievable I mean it’s a dream come true” he finally managed to say wiping his forehead with his bare hands.  The interviewer on the stage encouraged him “ It happens… don’t worry…you are talking to Steven Spielberg for god’s sake!” Everyone laughed. 

The man stammered, cleared his throat and said “Your mother is a musician…and your father a computer scientist…so when the spaceship lands how do they communicate?”

Everyone cheered including Spielberg, but as the sound of applause died down the ace director seemed a little ill at ease “ I mean it is like….both..they have influenced me in ways that every parent does” He then moved on to the next question. 

It was the early nineties. The world had woken up to a new kind of cinema in Jurassic Park. The extinct beast brought to life by Spielberg. In his career spanning more than fifty years, he had told stories about every subject under the sun. Dinosaurs, Sharks, Extraterrestrial, spies, soldiers, heroes and villains. Not many could match his versatility and range. But there was a  theme he had avoided all along.  Himself…his life. 

The Fabelmans, as the New York Times called it “is a disarmingly, at times painfully intimate movie about a family closely modeled on the Spielberg’s”. Set in the  early fifties and sixties. it is a coming of an age story where Spielberg’s real life takes on a reel avatar. Sammy Fabelman(Gabriel LaBelle) is the only son of  Mitzi( Michelle Willams) and Brut( Paul Dano), who moves from New York to Arizona and then to North California.

  As Sammy discovers cinema after his father took him to the movies “ The Greatest Show on earth”, he becomes obsessed with living within the contours of  cinematic expression. 

He started shooting movies at home, at school and with his boy scout troop. He soon, however, discerns the ability of the camera to not only capture lights but also emotions. The instruments  innate power that go beyond the science of optics. Looking  through the eyepiece Sammy not only  discovered his cinematic vocation but also his parents’ unraveling marriage. 

The movie is sprinkled with  tales of Spielberg’s  life. It is a courageous attempt at negotiating an uncharted narrative territory.  To tell one’s own story and to lay bare one’s personal vulnerabilities in front of the world, requires a kind of poetic vision that only a true artist possesses. 

Spielberg is an artist of unmatched talent. Each film he crafts reaffirms and at times redraws the grammar of the movie-going experience.  

It is Spielberg that gave birth to the concept of summer blockbusters. His genius lay in his uncanny ability to tell a story in a commercially viable and an artistically pleasing way. With this perfect blend, he extends his sway over varied genres of filmmaking. While others tell stories about the world surrounding them, Spielberd creates a world in itself… A world  so laced with grounded emotions that the audience is helplessly drawn within its embrace. 

No matter how fantastical the idea may be there is a shimmering innocence that lay at the core of his story. More than often this innocence  finds expression in the shared life of a family. The presence or the absence of a member, their beliefs, are anchors of Spielberg art of storytelling. 

In his own words “ Close Encounters was about a father’s voluntary separation  from the family to pursue a dream at the expense of losing his family. ET was a story of a kid who needed to fill the hole that separation had dug out of his life, and he just happened  to fill it metaphorically with this little squishy guy from outer space” Even in  Lincoln the father had troubles with his first born son.

For biographers and Journalists, this recurring theme of father and family seemed an emotional outcome of his long estrangement with his own father. In a very Freudian way, it made him touch on fathers one way or the other in all the stories he told.  

But it was Speilberg’s father who gave him, just like young Sammy, the first movie camera. It was he who took him to the desert in the middle of the night to see meteor showers.In high school his father helped him to make “ Firelite” a kind of dry run for “ Close Encounters’ ‘. Flabelmen works upon the dynamics of father and son and provides a broad template to comprehend the relationship nuances of his earlier films.  

The film also touches upon his experiences with antisemitism, and how movies made him bridge the social disconnect.

“Friends would always call me by my last name” recounts Speilberg “…so the sound of Jewishness always rang in my ears…But when I was making those movies in school, at first my friends thought it was a kind of weird…But I was basically weaponizing my social life with a camera to curry favour with these athletic, popular kids who eventually all wanted to be in my movies”

Steven Spielberg is  an artist unlike any other.  He dips his brush in the emotional storm of his  characters, to paint a humanized landscape where lights, camera and action work in a magical unison to create the dream of cinema. His creation isn’t just about getting across a story, he has elevated the entire process into the highest form of art. 

In a scene from Band of Brothers a TV series directed by Steven Speilberg the invading forces comes across a young boy. A soldier offers the boy a chocolate. The father informs  “My boy has never tasted a chocolate” In the midst of the mad mayhem of war this scene epitomizes hope with all its fervent beauty. 

It is so intense that one wishes that scene would never end. The very next shot shows  the soldiers and their war tanks moving across a field of blossoming flowers. He cuts the scene  but not the emotion. Therein  lies the brilliance of Steven Spielberg. 

The Fabelmans  goes back in time to a point where it all began.    

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